CAE Weblog

New Ironworks Blogs

I apologize to my readers for not being more active on this blog.  I have been blogging more often lately on the Ironworks Fit and Finish user experience blog.  If you are interested in web strategy, information architecture, web design, social media, usability testing and the like, you need to check it out.  Several smart people from our User Experience Team (much smarter than me) are posting good stuff.

And for those of you who are are self-proclaimed geeks, you'll also want to follow Ironworks' Under the Hood technology blog.

Meanwhile, I will continue to post here from time to time on topics of association interest.  Watch for tweets from @rjohnston.

How to Leverage SharePoint Search

Due to the snow conditions in DC and cancellation of the Association Technology Conference, Ironworks will be presenting a free webinar tomorrow ( 2/12) at 1pm ET. To register and receive connection details, go to http://iwsharepointsearchwebinar.eventbrite.com/ .

David Perkinson heads our SharePoint practice and knows more about this topic than almost anyone. If you are working with SharePoint, don't miss it.
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7 Alternatives to Numerical Lists

I don't know about you but I'm getting a little tired of this trend of posting lists.  Just in the past few minutes, I have received tweets about blog posts regarding:

• 12 Reasons To Stop Drinking Bottled Water
• 7 Ways News Media are Becoming More Collaborative
• Apple's Top 10 Biggest News Stories in 2009
• Top 10 Social Media Top 10 Lists of 2009 (counts as 11)

It is all starting to seem so contrived.  So here's my last list (for a while at least) with 7 alternatives to lists:

• Pick one item from your list and focus on it (quality over quantity)
• Write about the one item that someone else missed on their list
• Make a list, check it twice, and ask if posting it is naughty or nice
• Try paragraphs (for a list of 8 types of paragraphs, click Writing Tips Site)
• Plan a vacation to Top Ten Land and get it out of your system
• Switch from Letterman to Conan for a month
• Ok, this is just getting silly (but I needed 7 bullets for this to come out right)

A Christmas Greeting Video

The Future of Branding

SmartBrief's Mary Ellen Slayter recently interviewed Shiv Singh (author of "Social Media Marketing for Dummies").  The interview includes a discussion of social media trends and identifies social brands as one of the top three trends that business leaders must follow.  According to Singh, the companies that will win are those that let their employees and brand advocates become the "face of the brand."  He uses Best Buy as an example and points to Twelp Force on Twitter as a good example of a successful social brand effort.

I would argue that associations have the same opportunity to create a social brand.  In fact, that opportunity may be even greater than for corporations, given the importance of relationships and transparency in those relationships for associations and their constituents.

3 Reasons Why Every (almost) Organization Needs Social Media

1 - You can better manage the online conversations. People will talk about you and the issues you care about. They might as well do it on your site.

2- If you don't, your constituents will assume that you have something to hide. Do you? Transparency means opening the communications channels.

3 - Social media tools can help facilitate knowledge sharing with and among your customers, members, the public, etc. You can get credit.

When should an organization NOT use social media? When conversations must be regulated by law or you don't have any good answers when people are critical.
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New SharePoint Track at Association Technology Conference

Ironworks is helping ASAE and the Center with a new SharePoint track at the 2010 Association Technology Conference (Feb. 10-12 in at the DC Convention Center).  This will be a full conference track of deep-dive sessions for those who have some basic experience with Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration portal and want to learn more.

David Perkinson will lead a session entitled "Search Your Way to Success: How to Best Leverage SharePoint Search."  He will discuss how to configure SharePoint's enterprise search capabilities for optimum performance and share some simple customizations that can make a big difference in user satisfaction with search.

Brandon Anderson will share what it takes to "Make It Not Look Like SharePoint."  This technical discussion of SharePoint branding and customization will explain how layered CSS and the jQuery JavaScript library can help overcome known styling and branding limitations.  Take a look at one such public site that we recently launched for Owens and Minor.

Finally, I am looking forward to working with Karla Whiting at Edison Electric Institute (EEI) regarding a case study of their efforts to launch their public site on SharePoint.  We will discuss issues they faced including Microsoft licensing, AMS (NetForum) integration, layout/design requirements and custom functionality, including a really neat email newsletter application.

Several other great SharePoint sessions are being offered on SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Designer and using their Business Data Catalog.  An additonal SharePoint case study will be offered with the American Health Lawyers Association.

Ironworks is a Microsoft National Systems Integrator, their top tier of trusted partners, with less than 50 in the United States.  We are an especially good fit for larger organizations with more complex implementations and integration challenges.  In addition to EEI, our association clients using SharePoint include ISACA, the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) and the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.

Get Started with Knowledge Sharing

I don't want to set expectations that knowledge sharing initiatives are easy and inexpensive but you can get started with relatively little effort and budget. 

I participated in a panel on Knowledge Management at the annual conference of the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB) in New Orleans yesterday.  Also participating were folks from the BloodCenter of Wisconsin and GE Healthcare.

Russ Neumeier handled the case study for GE Healthcare. I was impressed with what this global organization (100+ countries) with 46,000 employees has done to foster knowledge sharing with very few resources in a relatively short time.  They prioritized their effort and focused on a few, simple, easy-to-use tools to stimulate conversations across the organization.

The primary tools they selected were:

MediaWiki 

 for corporate wiki

• In 3 years, they have 30K unique visitors, 2.4M pageviews, 6K pages of content 

• Used for meeting minutes, project updates, content launch pages, event organizing, historical info, product development

WordPress for blogging

• 220 blogs (50 active); 730 registered users (several multi-author blogs)

• Used for project updates, team/division communications, podcast feed, personal/team diaries

phpBB for discussion groups

• 1150 posts within 279 topics among 400 registered users

• Used for non-real-time discussion, anonymous feedback, event notes, polls and questions

Yammer for micro-blogging (i.e. internal Twitter)

• Over 2,300 users and 125 groups in less than 1 year and growing fast

• Used for non-real-time discussion, sharing status updates, asking questions, links to relevant information, and announcements

• Free version is hosted so they are careful about what is shared

As one user at GE Healthcare put it: 

“I really love the fact that I can share and when people have time or really connect with the issue, they can join in and participate with no problems of time constraints, physical location issues etc. “

I would encourage organizations to invest in a more deliberate and disciplined process for implementing a knowledge sharing solution.  Some essential compoments such as enterprise search and employee profiles may involve more complex solutions.  However, this goes to show what one large corporation can do with little budget and support.  There is no excuse not to get started.

Online Community Whitepaper

Social Fish has put considerable effort into producing an informative whitepaper entitled "Six Online Community Vendors for Associations: An Analysis."  They took the time to interview the CEOs from six companies that are active in this space and provide some feature comparisons.  They look at:

• Connecting People (profiles, connections, groups, alerts)
• Putting People to Work (blogs, forums,polls, wikis)
• Enabling Face-to-Face Events (live events, registration, calendars)
• Satisfying the I%ers (mobile, tagging, RSS, ratings, integrating with sites like Facebook)
• Details for the Techies (APIs, AMS integration, security)
• Behind-the-Scenes Marketing Tools (SEO, metrics, advertising)
• Working Together (deployment, pricing, support)

I encourage anyone interested in social media solutions to download this paper and keep it as a handy reference.  But I would also caution that this is a very incomplete list of vendors and solutions.  Missing are open source options, CMS platforms that provide rich social media features, and vendors such as Ironworks that have successfully deployed a variety of technology platforms in support of diverse social media objectives for both corporations and associations.  Be sure to ask lots of your own questions and check references carefully before partnering with any vendor on such an important project.

What does it cost to redesign a website?

My friend Becky Granger (Educause) recently posed this question on the ASAE and the Center's Technology listserv and sparks a barage of responses. Not unusual for Becky but may be a record for the listserv. The answers were a bit surprising, both from vendors and association professionals. Of course, many said "it depends" and it does. So many variables can impact cost.

What was surprising was the number of very low 5-figure estimates. While smaller associations need some bargain solutions, I cannot imagine larger ones considering a full redesign (research, strategy, revised IA, new design, integration with CRM/AMS and other apps, testing, etc.) for less than $250K and most will go higher if a new CMS and/or portal is employed. Maybe the better question would have been... What is reasonable to expect for web redesign within a budget of $xxx?

My recommendation: Find a partner with the skills sets and reputation you need and negotiate a reasonable hourly rate to define a roadmap for implementation phases.

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